A Brief History of Google's Street View Cameras

It’s hard to believe that Google Street View has been around for 13 years now, after launching in several cities in the United States - San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver - on May 25, 2007.

The cameras at that time produced 2.8 megapixel images, which is significantly less than new smartphones on the market today.

But 13 years is a long time in technology.

The first generation of the iPhone was release one month after Street View, on 29 June 2007.

It was then 7 years later, in 2014, that consumer level 360 cameras became mainstream allowing anyone to create true 360 photos with cameras like the Ricoh Theta m15.

6 years on and the market for 360 cameras has increased significantly.

Many of these cameras have been inspired by the work that Google, and their camera suppliers, have produced.

Here’s a look back on the history of the Street View cameras, and a glimpse at the future.

The Street View Camera

2006 - 2007: The Concept

In Street View’s “garage phase”, a Chevrolet van was equipped with side and front-facing laser scanners, two high-speed video cameras, eight high-resolution cameras in a rosette (R) configuration, and a rack of computers recording data to an array of 20 hard drives at 500 Mbytes per second.

The van included special shock absorbers, a custom axle with rotary encoders used for pose optimization, and a heavy-duty alternator from a fire truck.

Enough imagery was captured to create demos, which were deemed sufficiently compelling to enter the next phase of growth.

2008: R5

The R5 used a ring of eight small, outward-looking 5-megapixel Ephel cameras using custom, low-flare, controlled-distortion lenses, plus a fish-eye lens on top to capture the upper levels of buildings.

The R5 design also mounted three laser scanners on the mast, thereby enabling the capture of rough 3D data alongside the imagery. Whilst fitted on the original prototype, laser scanners weren’t present on the cars up until the release of the R5.

This was one of the first cameras to be widely mounted to other forms of transport including the Street View Trike and the Street View Snowmobile.

Elphel also produced a camera, the Eyesis, with a very similar design based on open-source hardware and software. The Eyesis has since been superseded by the Elphel Eyesis4Pi.

2010: R7

The R7 was the first completely in-house Google built Street View camera, it used 15 of the same cameras and lenses as the R5 (but with no fisheye effect) to obtain high-resolution images over an increased field of view (to see down to sidewalks even on narrow streets).

2007 - 2020: RX

The biggest challenge the Street View team faced was deploying the cameras at scale reliably. To ensure reliability, the widely deployed cameras have had no moving parts, unlike some intermediate designs including the R3 and R4 which used mechanical shutters.

Street View Ready Pro: For Street View-compatible 360 cameras tailored for in-motion recording with a high degree of accuracy and image quality. To have a product approved as being “Street View Ready Pro” requires evaluation by Google using a set criteria. Those that achieve Street View Ready Pro status have increased access to the Street View platform, including methods to publish 360 photo sequences not available to the general public.